23 February 2019 10:00 AM

SOME years ago, a colleague questioned a lobby journalist (for any overseas readers, these are the senior political hacks with access to Ministers and MPs) and asked how it was that he and his colleagues tended to be pretty much spot on about the possible dates of forthcoming general elections (this was before the fixing of Parliamentary terms)?

Out of a possible 365 days, the lobby journalists narrowed it down to maybe three, one of which would prove correct. Were these dates leaked to them, he asked?

Not at all, came the reply. When you knew the secret, making such predictions was not difficult.

By custom, he explained, general elections take place on a Thursday, immediately narrowing the choice from 365 days to 52. They cannot take place in the winter months (the recent exception, February 1974, happened during aState of Emergency), nor during the summer holidays. The weeks either side of Easter are usually ruled out, as are school terms, other than half-terms, given the widespread use of schools as polling stations.

With that chunk of Thursdays disposed of, whatever’s left can be further whittled down by special factors.

The last election held in neither May nor June was in 1992. Daringly, radically, it was held in April.

I can’t help thinking someone could make quite a nice career out of forecasting on the basis of one of two similarly tried and tested techniques.

Take the labour market. Just as everyone is marvelling at how well it is doing is probably the time to call the top. It has been in the past – the late Sixties (after the long post-war boom) was the big one, but there was a quieter echo at the end of the Eighties.

Conversely, the late 2000s, when the trade unions seemed to be in terminal decline, was probably the right moment to predict a revival. Sure enough, the current decade has seen a spate of transport strikes and a newly-influential breed of union leaders calling at least some of the shots in the Labour Party.

The objection that unions are strong “only in the public sector” is no objection at all. Quite the opposite. Which would you prefer to endure – a strike at your children’s school, or on your commuter route, or a walk-out at a Midlands engineering firm you’ve never heard of?

On a more trivial note, how smart did you have to be to forecast that the popularity of the Duchess of Sussex would start to wane if, as threatened, she made a habit of promoting right-on viewpoints? Answer: not very. I did so, here, on May 26 last year.

A final example. From the Falklands in 1982 to the initial attack on Afghanistan 19 years later, the only question asked when Our Boys went into action was just how overwhelming their victory would be. Anyone who imaged this would continue indefinitely hasn’t read any military history.

And this, of course, is the point behind all these examples is that the predictions are based on previous patterns: no economic trend, good or bad, lasts forever, and the same is true of the popularity (or otherwise) of minor Royals (or even some major ones).

Such predictions are almost entirely informed by historical patterns. Which works fine – normally.

A while ago, it was explained to me why artificial intelligence in financial markets will always have to be overseen by one or more humans. An example related to the dive in sterling’s value immediately after the June 2016 referendum result.

Accumulated data would tell a machine that the pound always bounces back from such slumps, gradually after 1967 and 1992 and strongly after 1976 and 1985. It would take a human to know that Brexit was taking the pound into uncharted waters and the past was no guide to the future.

Ah yes, Brexit. Anyone care to venture a prediction or two on that? No, I thought not.

Saturday miscellany

WHAT else is left to say about the Independent Group of MPs (the title is presumably deliberately ironic, given their aim is thwarting British independence)? At least the eight Labour defectors had the excuse of the party’s indulgence of anti-semitism (although I take it seriously only from Luciana Berger and Joan Ryan). The ship-jumping Tories don’t have even that excuse. Watching Wednesday’s press conference, I had to laugh as Anna Soubry reeled off all her personal achievements, almost down to the level of school swimming badge and National Cycling Proficiency. Fellow defector Sarah Woollaston told us she used to be a GP. You know, I’m sure she’s mentioned that before.

WHICH puts me in mind of my own theory about the true technological horror of our time, not comparatively-new (anti) social media, but, about 30 years old this year, rolling television “news”. As there is nowhere near enough real news to fill the available airtime, it has to be invented, usually in cahoots with under-employed politicians and assorted campaign groups. How many dumb laws and stupid public outlays has this led to?

I have just finished a highly-praised contemporary psychological thriller, I won't name it because it's enjoyable and I wouldn't want to spoil it. But the central premise, that we are meant to suspect a female character to be in danger from a male character when, in a coup de theatre, we learn it is the other way round, didn't strike me as particularly new - think of the 1974 film Deadly Strangers, starring Hayley Mills and Simon Ward. But doubtless we will be told this book "broke new ground" in portraying the man as victim. In much the same way, old ground is always being broken anew in music: once, Dusty Springfield was the "first" independent female star, then it was Suzi Quatro followed by Debbie Harry, Madonna, the Spice Girls and so on. There is something pseudo-religious in this endless repetition of "first times", in all this "new" ground that's always gittin' isself bruck.

A fine piece here by Margaret Sullivan in TheWashington Post on January 30 on the “smarmy centrism” of modern political commentary. It ought to be required reading for all those hacks in paroxysms of ecstasy over the abovementioned “independents”

16 February 2019 10:00 AM

WE’RE all, I would guess, familiar with the “golden age” fallacy, the notion that everything has been going downhill almost since forever and that the age of chivalry/of the gentleman/of heroes is over.

The opposite delusion gets rather less attention. This holds that not only is everything getting better (which is certainly arguable, at least in terms of material goods) but that the younger generation represents a new type of person, greatly superior to what has gone before and heralding a new and glorious era.

Great clouds of such wishful thinking engulf us at the moment. Here are just some of the wonderful ways in which most members of the rising generation are such an enormous improvement on what went before (i.e. us):

They have little interest in owning personal property (whether music, clothes or homes) and are almost entirely unmaterialistic.

They live “clean” and ethical lives, shunning tobacco, drinking moderately (if at all), giving up meat and dairy products in ever-increasing numbers and taking regular exercise.

They have no prejudices, maintain a generous international outlook and deplore bigotry in all its forms.

They care passionately about the environment and worry about disappearing habitats and species.

They have much less interest in the financial rewards of work and look for, indeed demand, interesting and engaging jobs in workplaces that treat them with respect.

As we ponder the glories of this homo superior, one or two little niggles may be felt.

One is that we have heard it all before. Check out The Greening of America, by Charles A. Reich (Random House; 1970), the celebration of the hippy revolution and its wider manifestations that Reich seemed to believe would go on forever, changing society entirely. Reich posited three stages of consciousness.

In Consciousness One, societies were punitive and sought to manage their populations through harsh punishments and the workhouse.

Consciousness Two arrived with the 20th Century welfare states and rational social policies. An example given was the abandonment of relying on tough penalties for bad driving to make streets safer in favour of better road signage and generally more intelligent traffic engineering.

All good clean (ish) fun, no doubt, but after Consciousness III came something Reich failed to foretell, Consciousness IV, the rampaging materialism of the “yuppie” generation, the Billy Bunters of the Eighties and Nineties who grabbed handfuls of tuck while chortling “greed is good”.

Two, Reich was pre-empted, in Britain at least, by enthusiasm for the post-war “classless” generation who rejected entirely the ante bellum hierarchy and snobbish homes cluttered with old furniture in favour of scientific-type careers, “gritty” realism on television and clean, modern lines in fashion, furniture and home design.

The election triumph of Harold Wilson in 1964 confirmed that this generation had arrived, albeit Wilson’s age disqualified him from membership.

Three, declaring that evolution has taken a leap forward and a higher order of the species has emerged has long been favourite among totalitarian regimes. The “New Soviet Man”, the “Aryan superman” of Nazi myth, the “Old People” (agricultural peasants) whom the Khmer Rouge declared to be the only type allowed in Cambodia, forcing all other people on to the land.

This ought to give us at least a pause for thought.

Four, how real is this un-materialistic, selfless, open-minded, clean-living breed? Is there any evidence that its members are any less (or more) self-interested than those who went before? Don’t special factors help explain some of the above?

For example, a lack of interest in owning property may well spring from the near-impossibility of being able to buy it, certainly in the south-east, while ownership of music is, on the purely practical level, un-necessary in the age of streaming.

The idea that everyone was giving up meat last did the rounds in the mid-Nineties, at the times of the mad-cow scare and the row over live animal exports. That didn’t quite work out, did it?

So, they have no prejudices? Neither do I (other than against skateboarders and people who cycle on the pavement). What do they want – a medal?

Finally, the demand for “interesting” work with employers who will treat them nicely is, surely, a by-product of full employment? When that goes, so, I would guess, will a lot of this sense of entitlement, if not in this cohort, then in the next.

That’s the trouble with the generation game. There’s always another along before too long.

Saturday miscellany

ONE alleged manifestation of this marvellous new breed with its superior consciousness came yesterday, with the “strike” of schoolchildren to protest against climate change. It was sheer chaos, the trains didn’t run, the power went off…oh, hang on, none of that happened because this couldn’t be a real strike, given school pupils have no connection with the delivery of goods or services. They’re not so much the means of production as the means of consumption. The last mass truant (sorry, "young people expressing their values in a very real sense") was just ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While many simpered over the idealism of "our kids", Andrew Marr had a better take: "It was all so much more fun than double maths."

SOME time ago, I wrote a piece for the Lion & Unicorn site on “preachy TV”, the growing habit of lumbering supposedly-entertaining drama with ideologically-sound messages. Those in the frame included Sherlock and Judge John Deed. The opening episode of the new series of Grantchester (ITV) was, in this regard, an absolute beaut. The crime-fighting 1950s vicar hosts a visit by black civil rights campaigners from the Deep South. One of their number is killed. Many locals are horribly racist. Meanwhile, the vicar’s partner, the local police inspector, takes an un-PC view of his missus going back to work. The curate conducts a gay relationship with a local man. Oh, and to round it off, the killer is not, as suspected, one of the other black Americans, but an affluent white Brit posing as a liberal. Every box ticked, a full house.

WEDNESDAY evening saw no fewer than five “rail enforcement officers” (most junior of the four – count ‘em – Police-type outfits on the railway) at a local small-town station. They were perfectly friendly, from what I could see, but it was quite difficult to work out what they were actually doing. Meanwhile, the imminent dismantlement of the gas holder in the same town led me to revisit two assumptions about such installations and find both of them wrong. One was that use of the word “gasometer” to describe them was inaccurate. Untrue – they were invented by the French and that’s what they called them. The other was that gas holders became obsolete once we switched from town gas to natural gas. Untrue – they are still used to balance the supply of natural gas.

09 February 2019 10:00 AM

THE pending departure of John Humphrys from radio 4’s Today took me, in a roundabout way, to an item once presented by his late colleague, Brian Redhead. It was the early Eighties, and the item concerned the then-novel concept of putting certain services currently provided within public-sector organisations out to tender.

“It is called ‘hiving off’,” declared Redhead, barely bothering to conceal his disdain for this ugly neologism. Shortly thereafter, “hiving off” became “privatisation” (scarcely an improvement), but once the P-word became associated with big public sales of State assets, rather than with inviting tenders for council cleaning services or whatever, the previous “hiving off” became “contracting out”.

By any name, this was supposed to be a brilliant idea. “Does the NHS really need to do all its own laundry?” was the thinking behind this, in other words “non-essential” or “non-core” activities should be, yep, hived off to outside operators.

This, it was said, would deliver two benefits. One would be that cleaning, catering, maintenance etc were best left to the people who knew about it, i.e. cleaners, caterers and maintenance companies. The second would be lower costs overall, as the tender process would force competing firms to make cheaper offers.

Hiving off spread to the private sector, where in-house tea ladies, canteen staff and, of course, cleaners were soon exposed to the bracing winds of the free market. Back office and payroll went the same way, security and building maintenance having long since departed.

The name of the game was to focus on the organisation’s core functions. The reductio ad absurdam of this came with a serious suggestion that British Airways ought to outsource the chore of flying airliners and concentrate on the real business: its reservation and ticketing system.

At this point, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that contracting out had been a terrible idea, even had there not been a plague of superbugs in hospitals that, doubtless coincidentally, followed in the wake of “hiving off”.

Going back to that initial question, does the NHS (or any other public body) really need to do all its own laundry (or cleaning or any other auxillary service)? It doesn’t have to, but aren’t there benefits in so doing? Such as esprit de corps, team spirit and the extending to those in less than glamorous occupations the feeling of being part of something greater – a hospital, a police force, a big city authority or anything else?

“We are the health care team,” declared a long-ago leaflet from the National Union of Public Employees (now part of Unison), with a photo depicting a nurse, a cook, a porter and the rest. All beaming with pride, and what’s wrong with that?

There’s been plenty of revisiting recently of the legacy of the Eighties and Nineties, but it tends to be big picture: rail and water privatisation, corporate rewards for failure, under-investment in public services. Below the radar changes get less attention.

They shouldn’t.

1) More bad ideas

IF hiving off is one dubious notion from the Eighties and Nineties, here are a couple more:

Flat corporate structures. These were all the rage from the mid-Eighties onwards, as companies boasted of having “stripped out tiers of middle-management”. This was win-win-win for the senior suits. First, canning the middle-ranking Reggie Perrin characters shielded the boardroom from trade union accusations of looking after white-collar workers while duffing up “the workers”. Second, it saved a lot of money and pension contributions. Third, it left the survivors fearful for their jobs and exposed to the top-dogs, with no intermediate tiers to protect them.

It was, of course, a stupid idea. The old ladder gave people a career structure and a clear route to promotion.

Internal markets. In those areas where neither contracting out nor full-blown privatisation was possible – key parts, for example, of the NHS or the BBC – strenuous efforts have been made to create artificially a market in which “internal business units” are supposed to treat each other as they would external parties. It has been suggested that maintaining these pretend markets costs as a fortune, as make-believe set-ups tend to do. The late Simon Hoggart needed a recording for a programme in which he was involved and asked the BBC sound archive. This “business unit” wanted a stonking figure off his programme’s budget. Hoggart walked down to HMV on Oxford Street and bought the CD for about a tenner.

2) Saturday miscellany

BARELY a week goes by without The Daily Telegraph carrying a tiresome feature, usually by one of its drearier staff members or contributors, boasting that they have given up drinking. As if the rest of us care. Thursday it was the turn of an outsider, some bloke called Andy Ramage, plugging his book, which urges us all to do as he has and give up…you know the rest. Don’t you love the headline? “How to tell your parents they’re drinking too much.” What about a companion feature? “Parents: How to tell your sanctimonious brats to sod off.”

WHICH takes us neatly to what will be the last two (honest) of my well-meant suggestions for reviving the fortunes of the quality press:

Editors, try actually editing all of the paper, rather than sub-contracting the fluffy bits (style, review, fashion, health and so on) to people who will use their positions as one long job application to the BBC.

Never make your lead front-page story some contrived piece of non-news supporting whichever campaign you happen to be running at the moment. Just to honour my “two only” pledge, can I just squeeze in here a supplementary suggestion? Don’t run campaigns with aims so bland that no-one could disagree with them (e.g. an end to on-line exploitation of children, to old people dying of cold, to the torture of hedgehogs etc).

PAUL Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, once cautioned against accepting that the reason given by the powers that be for a particular policy was the true reason. That has to be quadruple good advice in Britain, examples of whose political class’s duplicity in recent years have ranged from the “health benefits” of a high-carbohydrate diet, via the “green” wonders of diesel engines to Iraq’s hallucinatory “weapons of mass destruction”. Proposed assaults on the right of parents to educate their own children, untrammelled by State functionaries, have been variously justified as anti-child abuse measures, it being an article of the State religion that children need protecting from their parents; as essential to prevent “radicalisation” (what was called brainwashing during the Cold War red scare); as a measure to stop children joining gangs and stabbing other children, and, in recent days, as a vital tool to prevent schools from “off-rolling” (i.e. easing out the door) under-performing pupils who may drag down the school’s exam showing. None of these is the real reason, which is to stop parents educating their own children.

ALEC Gallagher of Bedfordshire contributes to the latest Private Eye letters page, asking why the magazine is siding with the “London-centric liberal elite” that is hell bent on trying to reverse Brexit. Indeed, this latest issue makes his point for him. “And to think that once upon a time Private Eye used to be the scourge of the Establishment.” The thing is, Alec old son, very few “rebels” can, in the end, resist the lure of an invitation to join polite society. Think Sir Mick Jagger. Or, now, Lord Gnome.

REED, the recruitment agency, sends me yet another list of helpful job-application suggestions: “Daniel, let’s get you smiling.” Well, why not? The first three proposed employers are Harvester, Premium Country Inns and MI5. Terrifying, isn’t it, the way the internet makes possible this precision-targeted advertising?

02 February 2019 10:00 AM

IT occurs to me that fiscal conservatism, as with every other sort of conservatism, may be something to which one is increasingly prone with age. Or could it be that my previous vested interest as an economics correspondent in a complex and ever-changing landscape of taxing and spending has long since lapsed.

Anyway, my reaction to reading about a report by the Resolution Foundation earlier this month (reading about it, not the thing itself, which I could find nowhere on the think tank’s website) calling for various tax reliefs to be pruned if not axed was probably not the one for which the foundation was looking.

Why, I thought, should there be any tax reliefs at all?

At school, whenever someone tried too hard to say something shocking (“Max Bygraves is actually better than Lou Reed”) there would be a derisory chorus of: “Oh, you’re so controversial.” There’s always the danger of triggering a similar reaction now.

To avoid that, let’s look at some of the reliefs at which the Resolution Foundation took aim. One of these is called Entrepreneurs’ Relief, which cuts to ten per cent the Capital Gains Tax payable on the sale of a qualifying business.

Why? I thought entrepreneurs were buccaneering risk-takers whose reward would come with the value created by their efforts. This applies to all the tax reliefs designed to promote “enterprise”. It seems a little odd that these rugged individualists, or their backers, need a helping hand from the Government.

Supporters of such reliefs point to the high failure rate of new businesses, which may ordinarily deter people from backing them. True, but basic financial theory suggests that the winners in a portfolio of start-ups ought to compensate at least for the losers.

The answer is for backers to have a spread of investments, not to be given special fiscal treatment.

Saving, like enterprise, is another Good Thing that the Treasury is keen to promote, thus we have Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) of which the foundation is not fond, considering them “poorly targeted and expensive”.

But why do we have them at all? If tax on savings income is thought to be deterring savers, then reduce it, or have a higher starting point, or both. What we don’t need are special tax-exempt vehicles.

I sort-of part company with the foundation when it suggests that low taxation in some areas is itself a form of relief. Council Tax in relation to more expensive properties is one example.

Then there are the tax breaks available to charitable organisations. I never gave them a second thought until, many years ago, Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail pointed out that the Good Samaritan had not asked for a Gift Aid form.

No, quite. And charitable tax relief takes us to the other side of the equation, the regulation needed to ensure fiscal breaks are not being misused. We see this whenever the Charity Commission investigates complaints of a charity engaging in political activity, or when independent schools are told they must “do more” to justify charitable status.

Get rid of the lot: red diesel for farmers, special reliefs for the manufacture of quaint foodstuffs or drink (craft cheese, pear brandy and the rest), “enterprise zones” that merely draw business activity away from non-zone locations, assorted reliefs for investors in the Alternative Investment Market (as with “alternative theatre”, the A-word here translates as “mainstream and State subsidised”).

See what I mean about fiscal conservatism?

Saturday miscellany

HARDLY had last week’s item, with its well-meant suggestions for turning round the ailing quality press been posted, than additional thoughts suggested themselves. In no particular order:

Sack anyone who has produced articles along the lines of “could brain surgery/air-sea rescue/woodland conservation/any other occupation be facing its MeToo moment”?

Publish precisely no articles written by front-bench politicians – we all know what they are going to say.

Ban the following words in the following contexts: tackle (as in “tackling knife crime”), boost (as in “a boost to the economy”), time bomb (as in “the obesity time bomb”), epidemic (see “time bomb”).

Ban the expression “furious row”, given it is usually used about staged disagreements between professional politicians.

Instruct your interviewers that they are to appear nowhere in the articles they produce – no more “as he greets me, I am struck by…”

STILL in the world of publishing, don’t bother buying this week’s edition of The Spectator. On top of three separate bits of anti-Brexitry (Matthew Parris, the business column and the irritatingly right-on radio critic) we have Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector Rebus, in the diary: “In my latest book, the only pro-Brexit voices are those of my gangsters, the very definition of disaster capitalists.” So don’t buy the new book either. That’s the thick end of £25 I’ve just saved you.

I wonder how Chris Skidmore MP is settling into his new-ish job as Minister for higher education. He got the job in December, and has probably by now grasped the full range of his responsibilities. These are (a) to demand universities allow free speech but then to do nothing about it, (b) to insist that “Mickey Mouse courses” be ditched, and then to do nothing about it and (c) to say constantly that “British universities are world-class” and “one of our greatest exports”. Not hard is it, really?